Watching Your World From Afar
by fangirlgonewild
Summary: General spoilers, Elena comes to the mansion on a lazy day.


Damon always knows when she's there, because she is human. And humans are obscenely loud without realizing it, always slamming things on counters and clomping down stairs. When your ears pick up the radio of a car from half a mile away as if you were standing front row at an AC/DC show, pressed against the speakers, you moderate your actions.

That, and he's learned the advantage of being quiet. Being quiet means he can be sneaky. Being sneaky lets him go unnoticed. Going unnoticed means he gets to observe, unseen and uninterrupted.

Like now, for example, when he gets to watch Elena wander around the mansion looking for Stefan. Her hair is damp, and the ends are fighting to twist their way into curls. She seems content to wait for his brother, a lazy smile crossing her face as she lies back against the cushions.

Damon likes Elena like this, lacking the pain and sorrow that he and Stefan so often bring into her life. It's rare that he sees her relax, rarer still that she shows up at the mansion just to be there. They've made her life so complicated, so full of danger and plotting—and endless interchange of offense and defense.

Damon thinks it's worth it, but then, he understands that he doesn't have much of moral compass. He often wonders how his upright brother justifies their meddling. Probably love. Love conquering all--that seems very Stefan. Stupid, of course, because love doesn't conquer anything except good sense.

He wanders into the living room and smirks as Elena pops upright, startled. She looks dazed, her eyes glazing over as she rolls them at him and sinks down on the couch again.

"You know, _I'm_ supposed to be the one with uncontrollable desire to nap in the middle of the day."

Damon pours himself a scotch and leans against the liquor cabinet, watching as she pulls a pillow over her face and pointedly ignores him.

"You smell weird," he says, after a moment.

"What?"

He has her attention now, though truthfully he noticed this as soon as she came through the door. It's the other way he always knows when she's there; everything smells like vanilla, all crisply sugary-sweet. It's just a little bit…off, today.

"Not bad-weird," he tells her, sipping from his drink and moving to sit on the back of the couch, "just weird. Earthy. Not how you normally smell."

Elena flushes, and Damon's not sure if it's because he's confessed that he's taken notice of her in the past or now. She looks delightfully innocent with the pink sweeping up her cheeks, especially as she winds her long hair around her wrist and brings it to her nose.

"I smell like the river," she explains, "Caroline and Bonnie and I went rafting today."

"Rafting?"

"Yeah, like we rented inner tubes and floated around on the river for a while."

"I know what rafting _means_," he says, not trying to hide the sarcasm in his voice, "the practice has been around for a while. I didn't know people still enjoyed _doing_ it."

Elena shrugs, used to his disapproval and clearly unmoved by his tone. She stretches her arms up over her head, arching her back languidly.

"I don't know what it is," she says, flexing and pointing her feet, "but every time we go out on the river, I always feel all lazy after. I don't want to do anything right now. I feel like I don't want to do anything ever again."

"It's the sun," Damon answers for her.

"Mmm. Maybe."

"It is," he says, lost for a moment in the memory of a different day, long ago, when he was the one dipping his toes in the river, tilting his head back to feel the warmth on his face.

Damon looks down at her, finds her eyes searching his face carefully, quietly.

"Well, I'm going to pay for it, look at this burn," she holds out her arms for his inspection.

Elena throws her legs over the couch, reaching for his hand and letting him pull her up next to him. The process dislodges one of the straps of her tank top; it falls off her shoulder and dangles against her arm.

"Why doesn't it ever show up right away? Why does it always get worse after you've come back inside?"

Damon is still focused on the strap, and he suppresses the urge to reach over and fix it, to run his fingers briefly over her steadily reddening skin. He's intensely aware of her, of the heat radiating from her overly-warm arms, making him shiver.

"Can vampires get sunburned?" Elena wonders, flipping her left wrist over and comparing it to her right arm, wincing at the difference in color.

"Not in the way you mean," Damon says, thinking of the scalding, searing, out-of-this-world pain of his own flesh sizzling under a sunbeam thrown askance by a window. He twists his ring around his finger, eternally thankful he doesn't have to hide behind thick curtains and live a life of literal darkness (a figurative one he doesn't mind so much).

"Stefan!"

Elena's cry pulls him back to reality. Damon shifts his weight, watching as she throws herself into his brother's arms, wrapping her warmth around him.

"Do I smell weird to you?" she asks, playfully tossing her hair over her shoulder as she looks from Stefan to Damon and then back.

"Huh?" Stefan's brow furrows.

"I went out on the river today, Damon thinks it made me smell weird."

"How…gentlemanly of him to tell you so."

Stefan shoots him a look, casually reaching around Elena to pull her strap back onto her shoulder. Damon downs the rest of his scotch in a single, fluid motion, then salutes him with the empty glass. But Elena has already reclaimed his brother's attention, her hand on his arm.

Neither one of them notices as Damon sidles out of the room. One more advantage to being stealthy and knowing it—Damon doesn't have to feel bad that no one tells him good-bye as he leaves.


End file.
